Despite strong research indicating that diverse boards perform better, boardroom diversity - and particularly the representation of women on boards - is still lagging. Tomorrow, Red Hat Executive Vice President and General Counsel Michael Cunningham will host Gerri Elliott, a former senior executive at IBM, Juniper Networks, and Microsoft, who broke barriers to become a sought after Fortune 500 corporate director for a special conversation with the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) Research Triangle Chapter. In addition to his role at Red Hat, Cunningham also serves as chairman of the NACD Research Triangle Chapter.

During the event in Durham, N.C., Elliott will discuss lessons from her path to success and talk more broadly about the value of diversifying boards, making it of interest to leaders who want to deepen their understanding of the opportunities that can result from diversifying their boards, or who aspire to be a private or public company directors.

To register for the event, visit https://researchtriangle.nacdonline.org/Events/EventDetail.cfm?ItemNumber=29442. Interested media should contact press at redhat.com for more details.

More about Gerri Elliott
Director, Whirlpool, Bed Bath & Beyond, Imperva
Founder,Broadrooms
Elliot is an independent director on the boards of: Whirlpool, Bed Bath & Beyond and Imperva, as well as two private boards, Charlotte Russe and Puppet Labs. She is the founder of Broadrooms, a website for women executives who currently serve or want to serve on corporate boards. She also serves on the advisory boards of BoardList, a database designed to help technology companies make their boards more diverse, and the Center for Executive Women at Kellogg School of Management.

Elliot is known as a go-to-market expert in technology companies. As the former executive vice president, chief customer officer for Juniper Networks, she led the 4,000-person Go-to-Market organization which consisted of sales, system engineering, advanced technologies, marketing, services, support, partners and field operations. She was one of the most senior women at Microsoft as corporate vice president of the Global Industry Solutions Group, Worldwide Public Sector and co-president of Microsoft's North American Enterprise Sales region. At IBM, she held executive positions in North America and Asia Pacific in sales, services, consulting, strategy development, and product management. She was vice president of the distribution sector (retail, wholesale, consumer packaged goods, travel, and transportation) for Asia Pacific, and was later promoted to the larger role of leading that organization for all of North America and South America.

She is a 2013 YWCA Silicon Valley Tribute to Women award winner and was featured in Profiles in Diversity Journal's Women Worth Watching list. She is a regular attendee at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit, and an inaugural mentor for the Fortune/US State Department Global Women's Mentoring Partnership. She has spoken on numerous panels discussing leadership, diversity and board service, and was recently the keynote speaker at Intel/McAfee's inaugural Global Women's Leadership Summit.